A very common way to hold a meeting and to perform group activities with widely dispersed people is teleconferencing. Teleconferencing is highly useful because it allows callers from around the world to participate in the same meeting at low cost.
Teleconferencing has been so successful that user needs have resulted in the development of modern teleconferencing “bridge systems” that allow callers to either dial into or log onto a computerized system that establishes a virtual teleconference. In such systems callers usually have to identify themselves, their access rights are checked, a facilitator is established, and operating rules are set and enforced by the bridge system.
Teleconferencing and the newer bridge systems generally support modern trends in education, business, and other group activities which focus on increasing the number and quality of interactions. For example, modern trends in education lean away from strictly lecture driven modalities and focus more on greater individual participation. In practice teleconferencing participants are often looked at as resources of an organization and as such the desire to incorporate those participants in decision-making at all levels has increased. This becomes a major problem as the geographic diversity of organizations and their participant's increases and as the need for better communications, such as teleconferencing, becomes even more critical. In fact, modern trends have placed such additional burdens on teleconferencing systems that even the newer “bridge teleconferencing systems” are often deemed insufficient.
The result of the foregoing is that more and more programs, be they sales, educational, marketing, or simply group meetings are being delivered and conducted via teleconferencing systems. Teleconferencing reduces costs, makes more efficient use of time, and makes a given meeting available to a greater segment of the population, including home or bed-ridden individuals.
While generally successful, call-bridge teleconference systems have a maximum capacity or number of callers that can participate in a teleconference. This presents a significant problem given the popularity and increasing use of call-bridge teleconferencing systems. A major reason that prior art call-bridge teleconference systems have rather limited capacity is that such systems can only handle the number of callers that a server that supports a call-bridge teleconference system can handle. That is, call-bridge systems have been server-limited.
Therefore, a call-bridge teleconference system that is not limited by the capacity of a single server would be beneficial. Even more beneficial would be a call-bridge teleconference system that enables facilitator-led teleconferencing over a plurality of servers. Still more beneficial would be a call-bridge teleconference system that enables facilitator-led teleconferencing such that when the capacity of a first server is approached callers are transferred to other servers and in such a way that a single facilitator-led teleconference is formed with all callers.